相关论文: From Animaculum to single-molecules: 300 years of …
Light microscopy allows observing cellular features and objects with sub-micrometer resolution. As such, light microscopy has been playing a fundamental role in the life sciences for more than a hundred years. Fueled by the availability of…
{\it ' Seeing is believing '} \cite{north06}- is the fundamental philosophy of optical imaging based on light microscopy \cite{ntziachristos10}. Since the pioneering works of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Robert Hooke in the 17th century,…
The application of microscopy in biomedical research has come a long way since Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered unicellular organisms. Countless innovations have positioned light microscopy as a cornerstone of modern biology and a method…
Ancient instruments of high interest for research on the origin and diffusion of early scientific devices in the late XVI - early XVII centuries are reproduced in three paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder. We investigated the nature and the…
The English optician John Dollond (1706-1761) performed a number of experiments with prisms of various transparent materials and concluded that an achromatic lens could exist. At that time, the dominant opinion about light refraction denied…
Optical microscopy is one of the oldest scientific instruments that is still used in forefront research. Ernst Abbe's nineteenth century formulation of the resolution limit in microscopy let generations of scientists believe that optical…
Some few hundred million years after the big bang the Universe was illuminated by the first stars and galaxies thereby bringing an end to the cosmological dark ages. Since the installation of WFC3 on the Hubble Space Telescope our ability…
The advent of single molecule optics has had a profound impact in fields ranging from biophysics to material science, photophysics, and quantum optics. However, all existing room-temperature single molecule methods have been based on…
Several early spyglasses are depicted in five paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder completed between 1608 and 1625, as he was court painter of Archduke Albert VII of Habsburg. An optical tube that appears in the Extensive Landscape with View…
Throughout human history, people have used sight to learn about the world, but only in relatively recent times the science of light has been developed. Egyptians and Mesopotamians made the first known lenses out of quartz, giving birth to…
The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) has been the world's most successful single dish telescope at submillimetre wavelengths since it began operations in 1987. From the pioneering days of single-element photometers and mixers, through…
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and the James Webb Space Telescope are transforming our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe. By combining their capabilities, these observatories provide…
The esteemed physicist Erwin Schroedinger, whose name is associated with the most notorious equation of quantum mechanics, also wrote a brief essay entitled 'What is Life?', asking: 'How can the events in space and time which take place…
An optical microscope is probably the most intuitive, simple and commonly used instrument to observe objects and discuss behaviors through images. Although the idea of imaging electrochemical processes operando by optical microscopy was…
Optical detection and spectroscopy of single molecules has become an indispensable tool in biological imaging and sensing. Its success is based on fluorescence of organic dye molecules under carefully engineered laser illumination. In this…
The Era of the First Stars is one of the last unknown frontiers for exploration: a poorly understood billion years missing from our cosmological timeline. We have now developed several methods for finally filling in the lost billion years…
This is the first expression of my thoughts and my experiments with Nature about the mathematical description of the Universe. The theories about our surrounding Nature became popular from our ancient civilizations and may be from the…
Biological molecules, like all active matter, use free energy to generate force and motion which drive them out of thermal equilibrium, and undergo inherent dynamic interconversion between metastable free energy states separated by levels…
The evolution of microscopy, beginning with its invention in the late 16th century, has continuously enhanced our ability to explore and understand the microscopic world, enabling increasingly detailed observations of structures and…
The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical…